I’m trying to improve the power consumption of my NAS. The 2 (7200 rpm) HDDs I had were using 15W at idle and 5W when spun down. I’m reading a lot of conflicting information about what is lower power between HDD, SSD and NVMe SSD. Eventually I started looking at SATA SSD (please let me know if this is not the most power efficient)

I found this site that shows a benchmark of different SSDs and their average power consumption. I was about to go with WD Red but then I found a YouTube video saying I shouldn’t go with WD for a NAS.

Can you tell me what brand or model you’re using in your homelab that’s power efficient? Ideally I would like 4TB SSD.

Thanks!

  • poVoqEnglish
    2•9 months ago

    What you claim here with so much confidence is simply false. Those are two totally different technologies, so it is comparing apples and oranges. And yes, I actually tested it and power optimized HDDs (for laptops) tend to use a bit less power than SSD. I was surprised as well.

    • @SpaceNoodleEnglish
      -1•9 months ago

      Byte-for-byte less energy usage?

      An SSD can have a higher power draw over a shorter period of time, but not necessarily use the same amount of energy. Remember that power is energy over time.

      • poVoqEnglish
        7•9 months ago

        You are moving goal-posts. Maybe you are right, but it is still false to claim something is always using more power because it has moving parts.

        And of course I didn’t only test it for 5 minutes, but rather the impact over a longer time period with the same typical workload of a home server/NAS (i.e. a lot of idling).

        • @SpaceNoodleEnglish
          1•9 months ago

          I’m not moving goalposts, I’m trying to explain more clearly the exact thing I said before. Feel free to read my original comment more carefully.

          • poVoqEnglish
            6•9 months ago

            I did and you are still wrong. Maybe you should read more carefully what you wrote ;) You didn’t specify in what way they are more “power-efficient”. And the second sentence is pure conjecture with no real basis on facts.

            Edit: Ok maybe you will understand it this way: if your workload is never exceeding the data-transfer speed that the HDD can deliver then the additional speed of SSDs is useless (a very common situation with NAS). So then you need to consider which technology is using less power over time under these conditions, and moving parts or not is not the relevant metric there.